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the Educationalization of Social Problems
ISBN 978-1-4020-9722- 5
I 11 9 781402 097225
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Contents
1 Introduction–Pushing Social Responsibilities:The Educationalization of Social Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe
2 About Pedagogization: From the Perspective of the Historyof Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13Marc Depaepe, Frederik Herman, Melanie Surmont, Angelo Van Gorpand Frank Simon
3 The Educationalization of the Modern World: Progress, Passion,and the Protestant Promise of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31Daniel Trohler
4 Educationalising Trends in Societies of Control: Assessments,Problem-Based Learning and Empowerment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47Lynn Fendler
5 Educationalization in a USA Present: A Historicist Rendering . . . . . . . 61Lynda Stone
6 Cultural Capital as Educational Capital—The Need Fora Reflection on the Educationalisation of Cultural Taste . . . . . . . . . . . . 79Kathleen Coessens and Jean Paul Van Bendegem
7 The ‘Educationalisation’ of the Language of ProgressivismExploring the Nature of a True Alternative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97Nancy Vansieleghem and Bruno Vanobbergen
8 Parenting and the Art of Being a Parent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109Geertrui Smedts
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vi Contents
9 The Educationalisation of Social Problems and theEducationalisation of Educational Research: The Exampleof Citizenship Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125Naomi Hodgson
10 Higher Education and Hyperreality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141Michael Watts
11 Education for the Knowledge Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157James D. Marshall
12 The Social, Psychological, and Education Sciences: FromEducationalization to Pedagogicalization of theFamily and the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171Thomas S. Popkewitz
13 ‘It Makes Us Believe That It Is AboutOur Freedom’: Notes on the Irony of the Learning Apparatus . . . . . . 191Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein
14 The Padagogisierung of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205Richard Smith
15 The Education Concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217Paul Standish
16 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227Paul Smeyers
Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
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Chapter 1Introduction–Pushing Social Responsibilities:The Educationalization of Social Problems
Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe
One does not have to look hard to find examples of the educationalization of socialproblems. Glancing through newspapers gives ample choice of what could comeunder this heading. For example, in February 2008 a local newspaper reports1 thata number of companies in and around the port of Zeebrugge are facing staff short-ages. To tackle this problem they are trying to convince young graduates to applyfor jobs in this sector. However, as the newspaper points out, generally studentsare not terribly attracted to courses that focus on shipping and logistics – suchcourses are held in low esteem. Moreover, although the notion that such coursesrepresent a typically male world unconducive to female candidates no longer holds,few women attend them. Consequently, the regional social–economic committee ofBruges decided some time ago to respond to this need in order to change the imagethat children and young people have of working at the harbour. It therefore askedK.U. Leuven’s centre for informative games to develop an ‘educational’ game thatchallenges its players to develop the area of a port. This should involve a senseof balance that takes on board the relationship between port activities, the naturalenvironment, tourism, mobility issues and housing conditions. The resources neededto allow trade to prosper have to be earned in the ‘foreland game’, where goods areimported and processed, and in the ‘hinterland game’, where goods are transportedby inland waterways, by train and by road. The new game will be designed to fitin with the ‘Anticipating Change’ project, where the port regions of Zeebrugge andHull are arming themselves against, and thus preparing themselves for, the rapidlychanging economy.
Transferring these kinds of ‘social’ responsibility to the school is a phenomenonthat historians are familiar with. It is a process that has been underway for a longtime. Who does not recall the ‘day’ or ‘week of . . .’ from one’s own schooldays,where special attention was paid to one or other social problem that was clearly onlytouched upon by the traditional curriculum. This would include paying attention toroad safety, healthy eating, polished speech and manners, alcohol abuse and animalwelfare. Such practices undoubtedly continue nowadays. In the history of Belgium’s
P. Smeyers (B)Ghent University, K.U. Leuven, Belgiume-mail: [email protected]
P. Smeyers, M. Depaepe (eds.), Educational Research: The Educationalization of SocialProblems, Educational Research 3, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-9724-9 1,C© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
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educational system this form of ‘occasional’ education was nearly institutionalizedin what was called the ‘school for Life’ at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.2
It may be seen as a compromise: the progressive educational reform and its callfor emancipation of the child were channelled in the direction of ‘adapted social-ization’, the hallmark of real ‘education’ since the Enlightenment. In exchange forobedience towards authority, children acquired some knowledge and skills (and thusthe opportunity to acquire a good position, or as the case may be, to climb up theestablished social order). It was not in the least bit coincidental that ‘school savings’(of money), ‘temperance associations’ concerning the consumption of alcohol and‘school mutual societies’ (in view of mutual help) were propagated in Belgium at theend of the 19th century. Such interventions were seen as effective ways of solvingthe social issue of poverty and of resisting the threats of socialism and seculariza-tion. A permanent feature of the school for Life was the notion that education shouldfoster the economic expansion of Belgium, which of course targeted Congo. Prac-tically all primary school subjects focused attention on the colony. Subjects suchas history and geography went to great lengths to detail the enterprise and courageof colonists who went to Africa and emphasized how much the colonized peopleenjoyed the ‘benefactions’ of Leopold II. Such themes also found their way intoreading classes and dictation exercises, in writing business letters, in the problemsthey were confronted with and, last but not least, in school trips (to the port ofAntwerp for example).
Insofar as this form of ‘adapted socialization’ constituted the core of a changingvision of education and the perception that social problems could and would besolved by education, it can be regarded as paradigmatic of Modernity. ‘Lookingahead’ and ‘hard work’, combined with the cultivation of frugality, obedience, use-fulness, patriotism, decency, health, hygiene and so on, belonged to the essence ofgood citizenship, which in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries would, despiteresistance, be gradually assimilated by the ‘people’. Thus, according to historiansof personal life,3 the grand ‘fight’ against alcoholism among ‘workers’ was orches-trated in such a way that the conductors presented themselves as apostles of civil re-spectability. They generally wanted to improve others (as well as themselves), gatherknowledge and rise above the level of their superiors. This explains why they prettymuch blindly adopted (e.g. through education) the values and standards of the dom-inant class. Some authors even speak of a genuine ‘civilization offensive’4 throughwhich the dominant classes were able to impose their values by inducing imitation,5
though the resistance to it may probably be seen as a ‘civilization defence’.6 Thesolution to social problems (such problems were tackled within educational settings)created new ones, which, in their turn, could be tackled ‘educationally’. This set offa spiral of educationalization as it were, the effects of which can easily be identifiedin the 19th and 20th centuries. An increased longing for individual freedom along-side the fear of abusing it characterized the internalization of the increasingly strictrequirements. This involved a spiral of ever advancing modernization, medicaliza-tion, hygienization, privatization, etc. As a process, this phenomenon resulted in thefleshing out of a clearly demarcated set of social roles and expectations (father asthe head of the household, the breadwinner, the idea of motherly love, civic duty,
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respect for elders, employers, property, etc.) that ensured the rise of the (neo-)liberal,(neo-)capitalist market economy and which endeavoured to ‘tame’ the individualinto accepting this form of society.7
It is thus not surprising that the notion of ‘educationalization’ (or ‘pedagogiza-tion’ – the concept is derived from the German ‘Padagogisierung’) was taken byeducational historians, (who paid inadequate attention to philosophical consider-ations), as an umbrella term for the modernization process. This process becamestronger in terms of upbringing and education from the 18th century onwards.8 Inthis book the historically generated ‘container concept’ is dissimulated through theconfrontation with the philosophy of education.9 This kind of approach is a commonfeature of annual Leuven interdisciplinary seminars on the history and philosophyof education and has been remarked on before in previous introductions.10
In their contribution Marc Depaepe, Frederik Herman, Malanie Surmont, AngeloVan Gorp and Frank Simon admit that during the last decades they have treatedthe term ‘pedagogization’ as an essential research category to depict the generalorientation of central processes and developments in the history of education. Fol-lowing Ulrich Herrmann, they insist that this concept must be identified with thequantitative as well as qualitative expansion of the ‘educational’ (‘pedagogical’) in-tervention(s) in society. The increase in the number of child-raising and educationalinstitutions was, according to them, accompanied by an increasing importance ofthe ‘educational’ gaze on society, even in sectors that initially did not belong tothe professional fields of teachers, educators, psychologists and the like (whichled, of course, to the annexation, i.e. colonization of new markets for educationalexperts). Aiming to describe one of the sub-processes of the ‘modernization’ ofsociety, the educationalization/pedagogization concept was intended to be a neutralone. As a result of some internal contradictions and paradoxes, this concept (as a‘container’ concept) acquired more or less negative (and even ironic) connotations.It was argued that educationalization did not lead to emancipation but contributedto the infantilization and subjection of the mind in order to serve the one-sideddesiderata of a neo-conservative society. Against the background of such develop-ments, Depaepe et al. gave the concept of pedagogization a more concrete place inthe history of education, namely as the pedagogical basic semantic of the so-called‘grammar of schooling’. According to them this interpretation can be successfullydeveloped as an essential component of a historical ‘school theory’. This is dueto the fact that the moral (even theological) dimension that lay at the heart of thepedagogization process at its inception had, in the meantime, been replaced by apsychological one. But this observation obviously does not constitute the end ofpedagogization.
Taking us back a couple of centuries, Daniel Trohler addresses the education-alization of the modern world. At the turn of the 17th to the 18th century, westernEurope experienced a dramatic shift in its economic structure that challenged thekind of political ideals that had dominated up to then. A particularly prominentexpression of this process is the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, whichpartook in an understanding of politics that viewed it as the object of private interestsand therefore presented politics as a sphere that was largely indifferent to moral
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questions. This kind of development evoked public criticism – commerce was ac-cused of inciting the passions of the people. Passion was seen as being coterminouswith femininity and by dint of this association, with desire and hysteria. In orderto transcend this gender-biased conflict between passion and reason, two thingsneeded to be dealt with during the 18th century. First, the nature of woman had tobe domesticated, and botany was promoted so as to instil order in women. Second,the passions had to be separated from commerce and thus vocation from politics.The solution of this latter task was generated in the Reformed Protestant context,and it was in principle educational: The soul of the young should be strengthenedin order to overcome the temptations of commerce, wealth and power. This edu-cational paradigm successfully and enduringly promised to safeguard the modernworld against possible dangers of modernity. Ever since, ideas of progress and con-cepts of education have been closely connected.
Next Lynn Fendler focuses on how educationalization has been characterizedover time by a peculiar interweaving of knowledge and social reform. She offersa historical and critical analysis of changes in features of educationalization. Thehistories of the American Social Science Association written by Mary Furner andJames Kaminsky provide a backdrop for this analysis of the interdependent relation-ship between knowledge and social reform. Drawing on the writings of Deleuze, thechapter highlights historical differences between previous and current educational-ization features in research and schooling. Deleuze’s depiction of ‘societies of con-trol’ provides a framework for the analysis that distinguishes control societies fromdisciplinary societies. Fendler’s chapter brings Deleuze’s theory into conversationwith standards, norms and practices in educational research. Three components ofDeleuze’s theory are outlined: an increased frequency of monitoring interventions,which is evident in the intensification of assessment mechanisms in both schoolingand research, the multiplication and diversity of accountability standards, whichis evident in models such as 360◦ evaluation and the foreclosure of possibilitiesfor completion, which is exemplified in trends towards lifelong learning. Exam-ples from educational research and teaching are cited to illustrate each of thesetrends. Building on the Deleuzian analysis, the chapter then examines characteristicsof problem-based learning, which is a fashionable curricular approach that origi-nated in the education of medical students. Problem-based learning is an exampleof the interweaving of knowledge and social reform because it casts education asan engineering task. In PBL, the purpose of education is to solve social problems.Education-as-problem-solving is contrasted with a very different sort of utilitarian-ism that was articulated by J.S. Mill. The chapter concludes with a critical analysisof norm-referenced standards in educational research and schooling, questioning therelationship between education and empowerment.
Lynda Stone takes up the organizing concept of the present volume. She looksat educationalization or pedagogization in the particular historical, cultural, social,political and centrally educational context of the United States. By being framedwithin a strongly historicist philosophical stance, a distinct concept, educationaliza-tion, is manifest. Educationalization manifests itself within writings that range fromgovernment documents to cultural studies accounts. It is discursive, permeating the
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discourses of institutional practices that are themselves underpinned by rhetoricalconceptions. Being situated in historicist philosophy and the concept of historicism,the chapter is organized so as to account for three aspects of an institutional present‘surrounded’ by two major forms of rhetoric. The ‘standard account’ constituted ofcommonly held terms and understandings that organize positions towards institutionand rhetoric helps us to make sense of these aspects of an institutional present andtheir rhetorical forms. Examples that are alluded to in this chapter include schoolingmovements, sections of No Child Left Behind, Structures of the Disciplines, Char-acter Education, contemporary classroom discipline and responses to youth culture.Themes of ‘reform’ and ‘crisis’ are woven through such examples. This chapterdraws on philosophical contributions from the likes of John Dewey, George CountsNel Noddings and Ian Hacking. Historical inspiration is provided by Marc Depaepe,David Tyack and Thomas Popkewitz, while ideological positionings are taken frompoliticians such as Hyram Rickover, William Bennett and George W. Bush, andsocial–cultural interpretations from researchers James Coleman and George Lip-sitz. The intent, overall, is to complement but extend a broad general conception ofeducation and schooling in the west through a particular philosophical rendering.
Kathleen Coessens and Jean Paul Van Bendegem argue that Bourdieu’s anal-ysis of dominant forces in society, linking economic capital (objective, materialgoods and means) with cultural capital (subjective experiences, habits and taste),has revealed hidden factors that are relevant to the education of youngsters. Theauthors analyse the evolution of the concept of cultural education, that is to say thetransmission and objectification of cultural taste in educational processes. The fieldof education contributes to the transmission and the ‘seemingly natural’ interioriza-tion of dominant cultural values. A lot has been written on the influence of culturalcapital on educational attainment. In the past, these dominant patterns were clearlydefined and received the label of ‘high’ or ‘elite’ culture, reflecting social stratifi-cation. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a variety of lifestyles broughttogether in the figure of the ‘cultural omnivore’. Such a figure is the product ofsocial, cultural and technological change on a global scale. Reflecting on this evo-lution allows the authors to ask particular questions and raise certain issues. Howare these new patterns, which take the form of symbolic discourses and a semioticsof practices, sustaining ideas of globalization, democratization and postmodernistconceptions expressed in educational discourses? Are educational researchers awareof the merging of these processes, or are they just caught up in current practices andforms of transmission of cultural capital? Thus they end with some reflections on theneed for a genuinely reflexive and ethical attitude concerning the educationalizationof cultural capital.
Nancy Vansieleghem and Bruno Vanobbergen argue that today progressive ed-ucation has become a main ‘interest’ in speaking and thinking about education.Producers as well as consumers of education are attracted by alternative forms ofeducation in their search for optimizing the quality of education. The general aimis to indicate how a particular kind of ‘educationalization’ is active through the useof the contemporary discourse on progressive education. Their research does notaim to denounce the idea of progressivism as a myth, but to analyse the conditions
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within which the discussion on progressive education has been possible. In theiranalysis they make use of three examples. The first one addresses the similarityone may recognize between progressive education and learning theories. The sec-ond one concerns the speech delivered by the Flemish minister of education, FrankVandenbroucke, at the occasion of the 10th anniversary of FOPEM (The FlemishFederation of Independent, Pluralistic and Emancipatory Schools). The third dealswith the starterkit for progressive schools. These examples present the way in whichpeople are addressed today as individuals who have to look at themselves and othersas investors in added value, both at the level of the producer and at the level of theconsumer of education. Aligned with Foucault, it is argued that the actual discourseon education that welcomes progressive education is not imposed by a politicalparty or by a group of intellectuals but meets a historical reality that forces us torelate ourselves in a particular way both to others and to ourselves. The second partexplores the nature of a true alternative, one in which the critique of what we areis at the same time the analysis of the limits that are imposed on us. Inspired bythe Celestin Freinet, this alternative can be considered as writing a free text, i.e.looking for a possibility to think something different that might serve to liberate us.Consequently, a certain kind of ‘experience’ is alluded to that takes precedent overepistemological questions.
Geertrui Smedts claims that what it means to be a parent today is framed tech-nologically: educational researchers and those in the field of writing about andworking with parents cannot help but see things in technological terms. That ishardly surprising, – we are people of our time: ICT has insinuated itself into ourlives. Writing about parents and the Internet are forms of practical utterance thatreflect this condition. It is therefore not the case that, in such writings, the computeris simply a mere artefact or tool that parents should get to know of in order toeducate their children. Rather such writings exemplify the fact that the meaning ofbeing a parent has been reduced to something technological. Educational researchcontributes to the continuation of this -ization, reducing parents to mere executors oftips and tricks that they are supposed to have learnt. She argues that this tendency isnot new: technologization has its predecessors in medicalization and more generallyin educationalization. Educationalization is present within technologization as thelatter embraces the paradox of wanting to emancipate versus wanting to controlor patronize. Technologization is just another dominant construct that frames ouruncertainties, anxieties and problems when something new comes to light. Thisdominance is dangerous as it serves to provide a narrow lens on what it means to bea parent. Smedts therefore proposes that educational research should acknowledgethat it is indeed yet another human construct that might have taken a different form.This also implies that what it means to be a parent might also have been different.She concludes that parents should be provoked into being more self-reliant andtherefore attentive to what adherence to technological thinking means and how itmay be exceeded by life experiences.
The introduction of citizenship education in England and elsewhere is oftenseen, Naomi Hodgson claims, as a response to contemporary social problems in-cluding a lack of democratic participation, anti-social behaviour, immigration and
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globalization. She views citizenship education as an example of the educational-ization of such social problems. The way in which educational research has re-sponded to the introduction of citizenship education in England is illustrated bya review of research, policy and practice over the last 10 years commissioned bythe British Educational Research Association. Hodgson argues that this review ex-emplifies work done within field of education policy sociology. Education policysociology is derived from its parent discipline of sociology, being structured aroundthe same concepts but lacking critical theoretical engagement with them. Instead,such concepts are operationalized in service of educational policy solutions. Suchwork is therefore conducted in the language of the policy it seeks to critically as-sess. A reading of the review identifies three dominant discourses – the academicdiscourse of education policy sociology, contemporary political discourse and thediscourse of inclusive education. Hodgson draws attention to the relationships be-tween citizenship education, policy and educationalization. The use of Foucault’sconcept of normalization in the study of educationalization is reconsidered follow-ing Depaepe’s suggestion that it is inappropriate. This enables further considera-tion of contemporary policy and the relationship of research to it. Normalizationis then discussed in terms of the demand on the contemporary subject to orientthe self in a certain relationship to learning informed by the need for competitive-ness in the European and global context. Hodgson argues that the language andrhetoric of education policy sociology implicates such research in the process ofeducationalization itself.
The next chapter, by Michael Watts, addresses educationalization by consideringpolicies intended to widen participation in higher education in the United Kingdomand the apparent reluctance of educational researchers to interrogate those policies.The central argument is that the drive to widen participation has taken on a life ofits own and that educational researchers typically fail to ask whether those policiescan tackle the economic and social problems that underpin and justify them. Thisargument makes use of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal whereby the linkbetween the real and its representation is severed, as the representation of the realbecomes its own reality. The economic and social justice bases of widening par-ticipation policies are examined, questioned and found to be wanting. In line withBaudrillard’s perspective, it is suggested that widening participation is not happen-ing. The chapter concludes with the assertion that by framing social problems aseducational problems and by leaving higher education to deal with them, there is arisk that educational researchers are seduced by the government’s policies and failto notice that the strategies they generate all too often perpetuate the very socialinjustices they are intended to overcome.
In the changes that have occurred in Western education in the last two decades wehave seen, Jim Marshall argues, national education systems moving from what mayhave been called a liberal education to a technocratic and entrepreneurial form ofeducation. In New Zealand’s past, such education took place in science departments,polytechnics and industrial settings. Within the last two decades polytechnics haveeither become universities or offer university courses. Whereas industry in the pastshared the cost of qualifications through apprenticeship schemes and day release to
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training institutions such as polytechnics, this has mainly been abandoned. Marshallargues that the process of entering the knowledge economy has been pushed rightback to secondary and primary education. Therefore, social problems (as perceivedby the State) have been educationalized. He argues that this situation is not uniqueto New Zealand. This paper looks first at Charles de Gaulle’s efforts, mainly dur-ing the 1960s, to unite government, the military, industry, business and educationfor economic, military and social reasons. Marshall introduces the example of deGaulle because the latter wished to bring these ideas to fruition as early as 1944when he returned to France upon the liberation of Paris. This example providesan early case of modern educationalization in regard to the knowledge economy.After identifying several strategies in the French example, the chapter turns to thedifferent example of New Zealand’s educationalization of their economic, socialand educational ‘problems’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing as an historian ofideas, Marshall, in drawing such a comparison, is concerned with the strategiesadopted to initiate changes in education – the how – rather than the content of suchchanges.
Tom Popkewitz considers the thesis of pedagogicalization through focusing onthe cultural theses generated around the family and child in American social andeducation sciences. Science embodies particular forms of expertise that function asthe shepherds of what is (im)possible to know and do. It constructs the limits inaccordance with which experiences are acted upon and the self is located as an actorin the world. Popkewitz argues that at the turn of the 20th century, Pedagogicaliza-tion can be identified as the educationalization of the family that rationalized thehome to socialize the child for collective social belonging, and in the turn of the21st century as the pedagogicalization of the family as lifelong learners, a mode ofliving as continuous innovation, self-evaluation and monitoring one’s life withoutany apparent social centre. The notions of reason and ‘reasonable people’ embodiedin the different kinds of expertise, however, do not merely refer to who the child isand should be. They entail double gestures of inclusion and exclusion. The expertiseof the social and education sciences is a particular historical practice that emergedin the 19th century and mutates into the present. It has two overlapping qualitiesin modern societies. Science is the calculated knowledge about social and personalrelations, such as knowledge pertaining to research about learning. It is knowledgebrought into daily life for ordering personal experiences and takes on board the‘rationality’ involved in planning one’s biography and thinking about ‘learning’. Hisapproach is a History of the Present; thus he considers how objects of the presentbecome knowable components of reality and are shaped, fashioned and change posi-tion due to diverse conditions of possibility. Knowledge is the political. It partitionsthe sensible through the principles generated about the objects of reflection andaction. Furthermore, the practices that generate cultural theses about modes of lifeare simultaneously processes of casting out and excluding what does not fit intonormalized spaces.
A somewhat similar focus is provided by Maarten Simons and Jan Masscheleinwho draw attention to the concepts of ‘educationalization’ and ‘the grammar ofschooling’ in the light of the overwhelming importance of ‘learning’ today. Facing
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the current importance of learning they doubt whether the school/education-orientedconcepts of ‘educationalization’, the ‘grammar of schooling’ and the relatedhistorical-analytical perspectives, are still useful to understand the present stateof things. Additionally, they want to indicate that concepts such as ‘disciplinarypower’ and ‘panopticism’ are no longer adequate for an understanding of what isat stake in so-called ‘learning societies’. The term ‘learning apparatus’ is suggestedas both an alternative concept to address these issues and a point of departure foran analysis that focuses on the ‘grammar of learning’. For this analysis, they drawon Foucault and in particular on his understanding of governmentality. They use theformula ‘governmentalization of learning’: learning has become a matter of bothgovernment and self-government. In order to describe the governmentalization oflearning and the assemblage of a ‘learning apparatus’ today, they indicate how theconcept of learning, being disconnected from education and teaching, has been usedto refer to a kind of capital. Such capital is something for which the learner herselfis responsible, something that can and should be managed and something that hasto be employable. Furthermore, they elaborate how these discourses are currentlycombined and play a crucial role in advanced liberalism that seeks to promoteentrepreneurship. They explain that entrepreneurship implies an adaptation ethicsbased on self-mobilization through learning, and that advanced liberalism drawsupon a kind of learning apparatus to secure adaptation for each and all. In theconclusion, they focus on the mode of power within the learning apparatus.
Richard Smith argues that philosophy itself has been the victim of a kind ofPadagogisierung. It has been subjected to many attempts to school it and renderit orderly – to establish a definitive method for the practice of philosophy. Theattempt to discover and stipulate method is of course characteristic of modernity.This chapter discusses one such attempt, R.G. Collingwood’s classic PhilosophicalMethod (1933). Collingwood argues that philosophy must avoid figurative language,on the grounds that it provides a distraction from thought. The aspiration here isreminiscent of the logical positivists’ attempt to identify the crystalline purity ofthe logical a priori order of the world, and of the employment by some analyti-cal philosophers of education of mathematical tropes, as if these guaranteed clar-ity of thinking and ‘rigour’. These enterprises are cognate with the general effectof educational research to represent the business of education as tidy and prosaic.Clarity, however, while of course desirable, is itself a metaphor. Collingwood’s owntext makes considerable and often vivid use of figurative language, and his claimthat the philosopher ‘must go to school with the poets’ is layered and revealing.Metaphoricity and even rhetoricity are ineliminable from philosophy as from otheruses of language, and the boundary between philosophy and literature is not a secureone. Both are all the more complex and more interesting for it. To acknowledgethis is to admit a richer range of language to thinking about questions of educationand thus to conceive education itself more richly and with greater sensitivity to itsdiversity, nuances and differences.
In the final chapter, Paul Standish observes that Marc Depaepe’s adoption of theidea of ‘educationalization’ offers us a new word and a new concept. He then goeson to consider how we analyse concepts and think about what is involved in creating
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a concept. This chapter begins by identifying Depaepe’s reasons for taking up theterm ‘educationalization’. It goes on to consider the obvious prominence of the ideaof the ‘concept’ in philosophy, particularly analytical philosophy, but then seeks toshow the limitations of an emphasis on the purely logical aspects of concepts tothe neglect of their occurrence within sentences in natural languages. The languageof marketing is taken as a striking example of ways in which concepts are mobi-lized to achieve effects beyond their referential function. This recognition lays theway for the consideration of the idea of the concept in Gilles Deleuze and FelixGuattari’s What Is Philosophy? The qualities of thinking that they are concernedwith promoting are compared with Bill Readings’ account (in The University inRuins) of the importance of ‘Thought’. The strengths of Deleuze and Guattari’sapproach are emphasized as means to richer ways of thinking about education, withthe speculation that the concept of educationalization might be fruitfully exploitedto this end.
In the Afterword, Paul Smeyers reflects on the preoccupations of the ResearchCommunity Philosophy and history of the discipline of education. Evaluation andevolution of the criteria for educational research. Starting from the initial questionsthat this group of scholars had set themselves a decade ago, he focuses on the pictureof educational research that emerges from the detailed analyses. Thus attention isalso given to the convergence of the studies of these philosophers and historians ofeducation with the present state of the art.
Notes
1. Het Volk, February 18th 2008, p. 23.2. Depaepe, M. (1999). The school, cornerstone of modern society. In Guide of the Municipal
Education Museum of Ypres (Ieper, Stedelijke Musea, pp. 3–20).3. Aries, Ph., & Duby, G. (1999). Histoire de la vie privee (De la Revolution a la Grande Guerre).
Paris: Seuil.4. Kruithof, B. (2004). De deugdzame natie. Het burgerlijk beschavingsoffensief van de Maatsch-
appij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen tussen 1784 en 1860. Retrieved from http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/krui019deug01 01/
5. Cf. the civilization process of Elias, Elias, N. (1969). Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation. Sozio-genetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. II: Wandlungen der Gesellschaft. Entwurfzu einer Theorie der Zivilisation (Revised edition). Bern: Francke (originally published in1939).
6. Simon, F., & Van Damme, D. (1989). De pedagogisering van de kinderlijke leefwereld. De“Ligue de l’enseignement” en de oorsprong van enkele para-scolaire initiatieven. In E. Ver-hellen, F. Spiesschaert, L. Cattrijsse, & L. Apostel (Eds.), Rechten van kinderen. Een tekst-bundel van de Rijksuniversiteit Gent naar aanleiding van de Uno-Conventie voor de Rechtenvan het Kind (pp.151–181). Antwerpen: Kluwer.
7. According to a concept of I. Hacking, cf. Hacking, I. (1992). The taming of chance. Ideas incontext. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8. Depaepe, M. (1998). Educationalisation: A key concept in understanding the basic processesin the history of Western education. History of Education Review, 27(2), 16–28.
9. In an issue of 2008 Educational Theory (Vol. 58 number 4) published a number of con-tributions focused on ‘Educationalization: The conceptualization of an ongoing Moderniza-tion process’ with contributions by Marc Depaepe & Paul Smeyers, Maarten Simons & Jan
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Masschelein, Naomi Hodgson, Bert Lambeir & Stefan Ramaekers, David Labaree, and DavidBridges.
10. Cf. Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2003). Beyond empiricism. On criteria for educa-tional research. Leuven: Leuven University Press; Smeyers, P., & Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2006).Educational research: Why ‘What works’ doesn’t work. Dordrecht: Springer; and Smeyers, P.,& Depaepe, M. (Eds.). (2007). Educational research: Networks and technologies. Dordrecht:Springer.
